The world of enterprise gamification has two oft-quoted statistics, and they are quoted all too often. The first often-quoted statistic is that about 70% of employees are disengaged.The second most quoted statistic about gamification comes from Gartner. In late 2012, at the top of the hype cycle about gamification, Gartner came out with a press release titled “80 Percent of Current Gamified Applications Will Fail to Meet Business Objectives Primarily Due to Poor Design”. This is the second most quoted statistic. We decided to take a look at Gartner’s report then and see how it fared.

Micro learning breaks learning into small bites, replacing or complementing long-form training and learning. It uses small, well-planned units, to deliver training and learning to users, when and where they want it.
With our attention becoming similar to that of a goldfish, micro-learning helps in training and information retention. It also works well with gamification implementations, with micro learning being recognized and prompted contextually.

Enterprise gamification is well into its 2.0 days. It is no longer (never was) about flying birds – it is evolving to encompass thinking about performance management methodologies; the use of gamification as an activity tracker ; a deeper understanding of employee motivation; and the use of game narratives. In fact, some would say that enterprise gamification is becoming the new corporate performance management.

Many of us rely on LinkedIn as a key HR, sales, career development and business tool. Some of LinkedIn’s ability to engage its users is its elegant use of gamification elements – from completeness bars to competitive game elements that compare a LinkedIn user to their peers. All this makes the LinkedIn environment compelling to many people and results in their investing in making their LinkedIn profiles and the data in them. Let’s examine how this is accomplished and what lessons can be learned for enterprise gamification.

This raises, of course, the interesting question of whether competition – gamified competition as exemplified in the LinkedIn example – discourages or encourages users. More importantly, it makes us carefully consider the use of completion oriented elements vs competition oriented game elements.